If I'm not entirely off my mark, the idea of solar sails has been around for a long time, and I actually had a friend in highschool who did a nationally recognoized science fair project concerning materials for and propulsion from solar sails. A few microns thick is all it needs to be, and it's still quite tough, think super-thin garbage bags, the sail material has similar tensile properties.
A 60MW microwave beam seems like it would make an awful nice weapon, but I imagine if it were space based, it could be somewhat less powerful to achieve a similar effect on the spacecraft. That and the fact that the power is spread over the area of a 100m diameter circle... 50*50*Pi comes out to around 7850 square meters, which means you get 7.643kW per meter squared... about 710W per square foot for those of us who don't like metric.
I'm not an expert, but 710W/sqft sounds like less power than the microwave in my kitchen can put out.
He displayed a little numerical dyslexia... it's 359 racks, not 539 for $100 Mil.
which makes the stats a little different:
31592 machines
63184 CPU's
63184 GB RAM
2527.36 TB of Disk space
and I'm not sure what his logic is behind the Teraflops calculations... looks like he's taking 1Ghz==1TFlop which would give about 126.4 TFlops.
Aside from that error, the figures sound pretty realistic to me. But I wanna know how much bandwidth they use.
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If I'm not entirely off my mark, the idea of solar sails has been around for a long time, and I actually had a friend in highschool who did a nationally recognoized science fair project concerning materials for and propulsion from solar sails. A few microns thick is all it needs to be, and it's still quite tough, think super-thin garbage bags, the sail material has similar tensile properties. A 60MW microwave beam seems like it would make an awful nice weapon, but I imagine if it were space based, it could be somewhat less powerful to achieve a similar effect on the spacecraft. That and the fact that the power is spread over the area of a 100m diameter circle... 50*50*Pi comes out to around 7850 square meters, which means you get 7.643kW per meter squared... about 710W per square foot for those of us who don't like metric. I'm not an expert, but 710W/sqft sounds like less power than the microwave in my kitchen can put out.
He displayed a little numerical dyslexia... it's 359 racks, not 539 for $100 Mil. which makes the stats a little different: 31592 machines 63184 CPU's 63184 GB RAM 2527.36 TB of Disk space and I'm not sure what his logic is behind the Teraflops calculations... looks like he's taking 1Ghz==1TFlop which would give about 126.4 TFlops. Aside from that error, the figures sound pretty realistic to me. But I wanna know how much bandwidth they use.